[MUSIC]

Okay, I'm Peter Winch, great to talk to you.

I've been instructed by Summer and Anna to give some thrilling story about perhaps

being attacked by a fire breathing dragon, or something like this.

And I'm going to disappoint them and talk about what I really want to talk about,

which is languages because I love languages, and

I've invested a lot of time in learning languages.

I'm into the low double digits, and I'm unapologetic for it.

So I'm going to start with misconception one about languages.

And I hear this from people all the time, and it drives me nuts.

People tell me, I can't learn languages, I'm bad at languages.

Well, the fact that you're saying this in English shows that you are actually able

to learn a language because if you were to say to me okay, then I'd believe you,

you can't learn languages.

But if you're actually speaking in English,

that means you learned how to learn languages.

Now, the question is have you decided to devote time to learning languages?

And perhaps not.

I find a lot of people, particularly in this country where I am right now,

they buy some language tape or book, and they work on it for

about 3 days and they still aren't fluent.

And then they say, I'm not good at languages.

That's crap, anybody can learn a language.

I mean, if you go to Europe,

even the people who say they can't learn any languages know three or four.

So I really think it's a matter of effort.

I mean if you were another species then I'd say, all right, you don't have it.

But humans are able to learn languages, and we should.

Next misconception, moving down the misconception top hits here,

is I can't learn anything, I will only be there for two months.

It's true that in two months, you can't learn as much as if you were there for

two years or two decades.

But much can be learned in two months.

And there are many examples in world history where people have learned

something in two months.

And, in fact, the academic terms here are two months, and

people still learn something.

Now, it's true you might not be able to be fluent in a language in two months, but

you can learn something.

You can learn something of value in two months.

And, then, this is one of the things that drives me the most crazy.

And I don't even have words for it.

People tell me, it won't make a difference, they all speak English anyway.

And I don't even know how to respond to this.

It's just not true.

Any effort to learn a local language, it shows that you're reaching out.

You're trying to meet them halfway.

You have some appreciation for who they are or what matters to them.

And that makes an enormous difference.

Even if you can't understand what people are saying back to you,

it still makes a huge difference.

So what are my tips?

Now, these tips aren't magical, right, because you could have the tip, but

you also have to do work along with the tip.

So tip number one is learning about the language, learning about the language.

See that word about.

Learning about the language is as important as learning the language.

Learning about the language means learning the language policy.

For example, what languages does the government promote?

What languages does the government try to discourage?

What languages do the freedom fighters think are important?

What languages do the freedom fighters look down on?

What's the colonial history?

In colonial times, what language did they promote?

I have Summer here and she knows about Indonesia.

In Indonesia it's interesting that

they were using Dutch there a bit in the colonial times.

And then the men of the Dutch left, boom.

The Dutch disappeared almost overnight, so that's kind of interesting.

What are the dialects and then what are the sociolinguistics?

What's the whole landscape of who uses what language, when and why?

What's the relation to other languages?

It's interesting to know that the language of Madagascar, Madagasi,

is related to languages in Borneo and places like that.

So Indonesia and Madagascar actually have a tight language connection,

which seems nuts.

But, actually,

people went in little canoes across the ocean from Indonesia to Madagascar.

And then borrowings of English.

There are always words in English that come from whatever language you

know, right.

We talk about the boondocks.

That comes from Tagalog ,the national language of the Philippines.

[FOREIGN] which means mountain.

But, yet, that's a word we use right here.

English borrows words freely from everybody Okay,

tip number two, pronunciation.

I think there's only way to learn pronunciation and

that is from other humans.

And I don't think you can learn very well from other humans in a classroom.

Because say you're in a class of 15 people, and you have an hour.

That means, if you're lucky, maybe you're going to speak for four minutes.

Four minutes of speaking isn't enough for you to master the pronunciation.

You need more time.

The way to get more time is to hire a private tutor.

People say, I'm a poor student, I can't pay for a private tutor.

People say that to me while we're talking in a pizzeria, and

they've just spent $20 on a pizza.

Twenty dollars on a pizza, you can get lots of private tutoring for

$20 in most low income countries.

The difference between a private tutor is,

and I've had private tutoring a number of times.

So you're there with your private tutor.

Now, if you're in a class, if you don't know the answer, you kind of look around,

you hope somebody else knows it.

If you've got a private tutor, you can't look anywhere, it's you.

You gotta do things.

And also everybody has their own personal pronunciation problems.

We're all different.

The private tutor can address your pronunciation problems,

not anybody else's, yours.

If you don't fix your pronunciation,

you get into a vicious cycle where you say something, and then people say,

I don't understand you, why don't we switch in English?

You get discouraged.

You never get on top of the language without that private tutor.

Intimately related to tip two is tip number three.

Put yourself in a position where you're forced to learn the language.

And that is not sitting in your office making PowerPoint slides or

answering email.

That might be going on a long drive with a driver,

and the driver only knows the local language and you only know English.

So if your're going to have a conversation, how's it going to work?

You're going to have to speak in the local language.

Or spending some time in the village.

But if you are always in the city in the office with people who also know English,

you are not going to learn any of the local language.

You have to trap yourself into speaking the local language.

Now, many of us work for USAID or we work with WHO or some other donor.

A lot of their reports, now, they have an English version and

a French version, an English version and a Spanish version, an English version and

a Portuguese version.

If you get those local language translations you can look at them, and

you can have the English version right at your side.

And you can pick up all the public health vocabulary,

which you don't typically learn in languages classes, right.

Now, tip five, okay, I'm running out of room for tips here.

So I'm just going to take all this off.

Tip 5 is I think people are quick to

install apps for music or for movies.

But there's lots of apps, and programs, and stuff for

languages now, and they're getting better and better.

I'm a Windows person, okay, I admit it.

I don't use a Mac, but this is also true for Mac.

On Windows 10, the language modules are excellent.

The dictionaries are really good, they're getting better all the time.

The font support is fantastic.

You should install the local fonts and the language module on your computer.

If nothing else, you have fun with it, fun playing with the font.

If you don't enjoy playing with fonts, I really feel bad for

you because fonts are a lot of fun.

So now we going to go into tip six.

Tip six is a long tip.

And tip six, a lot of people don't think about it,

but there is something called the international phonetic alphabet.

And it's an alphabet that tells you how to pronounce things.

And you should get a dictionary.

For example, this dictionary here, it's a French dictionary.

And you look up a French word, and you'll see the French word.

Then you'll see something written and you'll think, what is that?

Well, that is that same word written with the International Phonetic Alphabet.

And it's a bit intimidating, some weird symbols.

But if you learn the International Phonetic Alphabet,

then that's the gateway into correctly pronouncing a language.

And Wikipedia is phenomenal on the International Phonetic Alphabet.

They have a separate page for each sound in the International Phonetic Alphabet.

And you can go, and it can tell you how you make the sound.

But that will make no sense to you.

But you can also click on the sound and it will go or something.

So then you can hear that sound,

and you can start to put the symbol together with the sound.

And this never existed before.

We used to have to read long descriptions of the sound in the dictionary.

Now you can go online in Wikipedia, click on the sound and it'll say what it is.

Okay, so for French, there's a special IPA page just for French.

And it's got each sound in French, and you can click on that sound and

it'll say it to you.

So in that way you can associate the sounds with how they're supposed to sound.

And I think the key to learning French is figuring how to associate

the phonetic sounds with the sounds.

So let's say in French you see this, right.

Now, if you're a naive English speaker, you might think that says [FOREIGN] right.

But it doesn't say [FOREIGN], it says [FOREIGN], right.

The way you write that in

the IPA is [FOREIGN], right.

Once you learn the International Phonetic Alphabet, you can look at a word and

actually know how it sounds.

And that unlocks tremendous power that you can actually

make yourself understood to other people.

And a lot of people avoid the IPA.

And, instead, they look at little descriptions of how a word is pronounced.

They say, sounds like machine or something.

It sounds like bluh, but you can't figure that out.

It's easier to just learn these IPA symbols.

So does this have anything to do with public health?

Well, is it epidemiological?

No, but I think if you want to be effective in the field,

even learning a bit of the language, helps a bit.

And learning a lot of the language, helps a lot.

And you can do it.

If you've mastered English, which has impossible pronunciation, and

impossible spelling, you can master any language.

And the only thing standing between you and

knowing another language is deciding you want to put in the effort to learn it.

And I'm not denying that there's effort.

Any language requires effort, but it's worth doing.

Thank you.

The Importance of Learning Languages

International Travel Preparation, Safety, & Wellness

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